The legacy of the Mother franchise is evident. While the core trilogy has only two games that have officially reached outside of Japan, the ideas of all titles, spanning from NES to GBA, resonate in players and developers. It’s the delivery of something that’s profound and sometimes shattering in a package of whimsy and amusement. Earthbound, one of my favorite titles, is a brilliant blend of RPG grind and absurd moments with a sense of humanity’s worth, what existence means, and the connections we make with the world around us. Earthbound has inspired Undertale, LISA, and countless others, but the influence continues. Capturing the feeling and the delivery has always been difficult, and not every game has succeeded. But I’d like to put my personal endorsement on a new console release, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass.

Ah, when NPCs decide to emotionally overshare for no apparent reason. Art!

Jimmy, aged eight, awakens in a field, for no particular reason, and is soon asked by his mother to go pick up some honey. Jimmy is accompanied by his gruff older brother, Buck, who reluctantly agrees to go help him on this errand. It becomes immediately apparent that Jimmy’s world is a bit different. Animals talk and walk around. Nature seems to breathe and shift, and weird enemies are everywhere. Buck is big and tough, but Jimmy is far from helpless, able to harness the power of his own imagination to create wonderful, versatile personas. Yet it’s only when they reach the bees and find something is awry that the story truly begins. From the depths of space to a haunted mansion, from a forest with ever changing scenes to the very realm of sleep itself, Jimmy is in for a bizarre adventure, but, thankfully, he is not alone.

Playing as a traditional JRPG, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass has you walking along, picking up party members, buying equipment and fighting bad guys to get EXP and level up. The engagement system is a little different, with green and red exclamation points indicating combat. If green, you have the option to dismiss the battle: you don’t get anything from it, but you also don’t have to spend time in a fight you’re statistically going to dominate.

Red means you’re in it regardless, and you and your party members will have to fight, cast magic of sorts, use items or guard your way through. Everyone who isn’t Jimmy has a general class that they’ll follow throughout the game, and, while they won’t learn skills through leveling up, you can give them interchangeable spells through equippable books you find or purchase.

Phoenix Downs? Life spells? Hell no: we just get SUPER EXCITED.

Jimmy is a fascinating multitool of a protagonist. Occasionally, Jimmy and company will fight an enemy that’s a boss of sorts and will leave him imaging himself as that creature. Jimmy now has the ability to transform himself into that being, which comes with a different skill set in battle as well as different overworld abilities. One of the very first, a slime, lets you notify enemies where you are so you can instantly start a battle, and also slip through narrow cracks and drains because, well, slime. The more time you spend fighting as the imaginary being, the more the being levels up, eventually unlocking skills –  both active and passive – that Jimmy can permanently assign regardless of your role. That slime, for example, can give you resistance to getting sick once you hit level 15, so it’s worth the grind.

Speaking of grind, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass does a wonderful job of accommodating players who are looking for more or less fight sequences. The difficulty meter can be adjusted at any time throughout the game, and setting it to easy really makes all the difference even if you only do it for a short while. Whereas the hard mode really sets combat victories high and stakes deadly, easy mode doubles EXP drops, halves enemy health and generally makes the grind a piece of cake. As I was most compelled to go through the story, this was a godsent for me. A lot of these Earthbound inspired titles either veer too hard or too easy on fighting, so it was nice to have manual control for when I wanted to focus more on the tale and less on the gameplay.

Jimmy has a fantastic styling to it, somehow paying homage to the games that inspire it while still standing on its own. It takes a lot to strike a middle ground of the cute and the gross, and Kasey Ozymy has accomplished this with aplomb and flair. It was incredible to watch the silly and goofy Worker Bees become grotesque and horrifying once the zombie-like infection set in, giving sharp contrast in the same area. Starting in a town literally called Smile and ending up in a haunted mansion with a body in the bathtub was, in a word, upsetting, but I was here for it. The sprites and areas all have a specific tone that really feels like it’s born from a child’s mind, one who is trying to decrypt a world around him that’s beyond his control.

“So when I say to clean your room, I think we’ll be complying from here on in.”

This only further comes through in the soundtrack. While you could have let the tone of the game do all the talking, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass makes a point to craft unique soundscapes for every lair. You have tones that are uplifting and jaunty, ones that are foreboding and stressful, and ones that seem to pluck at an unknown but recognizable discomfort at the back of your mind. After getting the bear transformation, I ended up in a secret area where the score let me know, with no uncertainty, that I was beyond the realm of conscious thought. Ozymy has put a lot of thought into his compositions, with tracks like Samurai Children starting quirky and building into dramatic flourish, or the wholly unironic Please God Make It Stop Polka. This is one of those soundtracks that incorporates so well into musical memory, so it comes highly recommended.

But all of this would be for naught if the game simply didn’t deliver in terms of storytelling. In spite of being dropped into the world with little preamble, you’re instantly on board with the tonality and the atmosphere of Jimmy’s world. You’re helped by an older brother who clearly doesn’t want to, but still will. You’re attacked by a gang of thugs who push around mice. You get abducted by a spaceship driven by a dog, watch a musical performance that ends in a whodunnit, and end up going to school where your uncle’s waifu apparently attends (and the game briefly becomes a visual novel). It’s wacky and weird, and it works because it carries two ideas simultaneously in its mind at once. Like life and the games that came before it, Jimmy knows that you can’t just be funny or sad: you gotta be both.

Incredible name, incredible entrance, pay no attention to the pile of ruined motorcycles from previous attempts.

The humor is so on point throughout that it has real “blink and you’ll miss it” moments. In spite of the silliness, there are several dead bodies that crop up, including in your brother’s bedroom, that just stay because no one has bothered to pick them up. You can sneak in and see “adult fun time” in mom and dad’s room. There’s an endless, verbose quality to everyone needing to explain more and more, and that somehow only makes it funnier. There is a moment when the talking teddy bear, Jonathon, does something so horrifying, and Jimmy’s mom quips “Jonathon, I’m starting to think you’re a very bad bear” and I laughed aloud. The humor isn’t nonstop, but it’s a throughline that we keep coming back to, like a walking bass line that keeps the story moving.

And when the game kicks you, it kicks you HARD. I understand Earthbound is the touchstone that many people will look to, but Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass feels like it’s closer to Mother 3. It has the polish and the detail that comes from years of development, but the moments of discovery and heartbreak hurt so severely it made me gasp. Any player worth their literacy tests will be able to figure out the story long before the big reveal, but you can easily forget when you’re wrapped up in the whimsy and adventure. There are moments that will shake you to your core if you let the game in, and, I won’t lie, I teared up more than once. Having something be born from the mind of a child put me back in the world of Rakuen, and that was very hard to process.

This is like an hour in.

I’m late to the party with Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. I never experienced it on PC, and this console enhanced version might be wasted on me because I don’t know how much was added. But, like last year’s OFF, bringing a story like this to the wider audience is beyond my wildest dreams and expectations. An early contender for my favorite experience of 2026, this has done the impossible. It’s a real Western delivery of what Mother is supposed to feel like, and it does it with the dedication and love that a creator can deliver. It’s funny, sad, complex, it’s full of side quests and exploration, and it feels like a missing piece in my gaming library. If you have any love for JRPGs of the offbeat variety, you’re going to positively fall in love – and then get depressed – with Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass.

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is available now on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and XBox Series X/S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass was provided by the publisher.